Reel Politique: Magazine Review, Lemon
As a dinosaur, I don’t really understand these newfangled magazines the kids are putting out. With titles like Plasm or Egg they appear to be a combination of fashion, movies, and rock and roll, which I presume is all that the young think about, though if they do it is obviously with an arch, distanced, wry, hipster, easily bored coffee house stance. Often these magazines are just an excuse for an art director to play around with a bunch of new fonts, with the actual subject matter or content mattering little. But now, the third issue of a new pop art magazine annual called Lemon is out and I really want to understand this genre of magazine because the theme of the issue is all things Kubrick.
Said theme begins with a cover portrait of Leelee Sobieski (who was in Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut) “as” Jack Torrance from The Shining. Inside the mag proper is a multi-media event, even down to the inclusion of a record in flexi-disc form of Gavin Friday doing a new version of A Clockwork Orange’s signature tune, “Singin’ In The Rain.” At only $8.95 it seems like a pretty good bargain, though you won’t come away learning much new about Kubrick. Malcolm McDowell, who was in Orange, gives an entertaining interview in which he also talks about Heroes and the new Halloween remake, in which he takes the Donald Pleasance role. Leelee Sobieski is also inside the pages in one of those maddening Maxim-style interviews in which the writer keeps pursuing the topic of Miss Sobieski and Milla Jovovich (who stared in competing editions of the Joan of Arc story) in a mud wrestling match. Tangential to Kubrick but presented in the style of his movies are profiles of book cover designer Chip Kidd and an interview in comic book form with Goldfrapp. Also honored are the artists Gregory Crewdson (who actually tells stories in his photographs), Allen Jones (whose art figures briefly in Orange), and Marvel comics hero Jack Kirby, who did a brief series based on 2001.
Kubrick is all the rage all of a sudden. There is a festival of his feature films touring the nation’s museums (one in Portland is just ending). The run of the films at the Seattle museum inspired a “let’s cut to the chase” piece by Charles Mudede (whose three-word lead sentence contains a grammatical error) for The Stranger. It matches a similar piece by the otherwise brilliant Thomas Doherty in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is ostensibly a review of several new Kubrick books, including the new one by James Naremore.
Undaunted, Warner Bros. Home Video is releasing another new box set of Kubrick films this fall, this time including the uncensored version of Eyes Wide Shut that everyone else in the world got to see on the big screen except Americans, and all the movies in the 16×9 format for high definition TV screens.
September 1st, 2007 at 9:07 pm
It’s amusing that this blogger has assumed that Lemon is produced by “kids”, given that the three primary creators (myself included) are well into their 40s. Lemon has very little in common with other magazines on the rack these days, whether they be produced by twenty-somethings of eighty-somethings.
September 1st, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Make that “twenty-somethings OR eighty-somethings.” Where’s our proofreader when we need her?